Ralph Ellison

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

— Ralph Ellison

“You're very insistent, but I'm very busy.”

— Ralph Ellison

“During these times of indecision when all the old answers are proven false, the people look back to the dead to give…

— Ralph Ellison

“Some things are just too unjust for words, and too ambiguous for either speech or ideas.”

— Ralph Ellison

Having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must…

— Ralph Ellison

There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

— Ralph Ellison

Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know…

— Ralph Ellison

I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new -- by putting something else with what you've…

— Ralph Ellison

“I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a…

— Ralph Ellison

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate…

— Ralph Ellison

So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the…

— Ralph Ellison

I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might…

— Ralph Ellison

“Literature is integrated, and I'm not just talking about color or race. I'm talking about the power of literature to make us…

— Ralph Ellison

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with…

— Ralph Ellison

It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

— Ralph Ellison

“We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We…

— Ralph Ellison

“What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself…

— Ralph Ellison

I suddenly recall the arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass-gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed;…

— Ralph Ellison

The world is a possibility if only you'll discover it.

— Ralph Ellison

I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time…

— Ralph Ellison

“...she was something more- a force, a stable, familiar force like something out of my past which kept me from whirling off…

— Ralph Ellison

“I'd been so fascinated by the notion, that I'd forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth. I'd been asleep, dreaming.”

— Ralph Ellison

The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

— Ralph Ellison

“It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.”

— Ralph Ellison

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it…

— Ralph Ellison